


How to Combat Awkwardness with Maximum Ridiculosity

by veeagainst



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Boys Behaving Badly, First Kiss, Fluff, Hogwarts Era, Humor, M/M, Marauders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 02:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/947348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veeagainst/pseuds/veeagainst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Marauders give a presentation in History of Magic that doesn't go quite as anyone would have liked -- except for Remus and Sirius.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Combat Awkwardness with Maximum Ridiculosity

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2005 for the Scarves n' Hats challenge on lj and cleaned up by me today. Title adapted from Questionable Content and has formed a significant part of my life's philosophy for many years.

 

All four of them were crammed into the fourth floor boys toilet – the one with the long marble counter and the sink set into it, with the odd portrait of the only hag professor Hogwarts had ever had (Ursula the Unfortunate, professor of Alchemy, 1646-1647) hanging on the door of the single stall – you must know it, it’s right near Binns’ office – and all four of them had somehow managed to fit inside of it.  They had twenty minutes to go before they were scheduled to enter their History of Magic class and deliver a presentation upon a topic so unbelievably complicated and arcane that I won’t bother to try to explain it to you. 

I know, I know, since when does Binns require students to make presentations or for that matter do anything but fill endless scrolls with cramped handwriting?  You came to Hogwarts in a later generation, and for that matter, a generation after Harry Potter first defeated Voldemort, so you never heard about the Marauders – they were legends in their time at Hogwarts, but after October 1981, no one remembered them for being carefree pranksters at school.  That’s why you think that Binns never assigned anything else.  The truth of the matter is that once, in October of 1977, Professor McGonagall, so tired of the complaints from her students about how boring History of Magic was, demanded that Binns change his curriculum and include student participation.  Crazy idea, right?  He didn’t know what to say to that, so she suggested that he make groups of students give presentations to the class about topics from history.  He duly took her suggestion, but in the process, managed to make it boring anyway by choosing the topics for the groups. 

His real mistake, however, came when he allowed the students to choose their own groups.  It was a NEWT class, and as such, it only included students who were serious about the study of history; possibly, he managed to overlook the fact that there were four boys from Gryffindor who would undoubtedly form a group of such inherently mischievous nature – a group for whom boredom was wholly inimical – that the entire enterprise would be counterintuitive to his understanding of what history was and how it was to be done.  Naturally, they were such a roaring, err, success, that Binns cancelled all further presentations and returned to his normal teaching methods.

So there they all were, crammed into that toilet.  Only twenty minutes to go.

           

Sirius Black leaned close to the mirror, messing with the fringe of straight black hair that hung down into his eyes, flipping it from one side to the other, pulling it straight and then roughing it up into spiky bits, all while casting furtive glances to his right.  Seated there, perched atop the marble counter and bent over a thick book, Remus Lupin chewed on his quill and occasionally spoke in rambling, jargon-laden sentences.

“And then one of us can talk about – Padfoot, I think it had better be you -- can talk about the rise of the Centaur Authority as a reaction against the dominant power ideology…”

Peter Pettigrew sat at Remus’s feet, shuffling through a large collection of parchment, hastily scribbling revisions and blotting pages.  Beside him – close enough that his foot had already knocked Peter’s ink jar onto his notes twice – James Potter lounged against the wall, a thick sheaf of parchment clutched haphazardly in his hands. 

“Oh, hell, I hate Binns,” he moaned.

“I hate McGonagall.  She decided we should present rather than him,” Peter said fervently.

“And if someone – Pads, maybe you again – wants to mention the ramifications of the Treaty of Stockholm on the French Wizardry Brigade – by which, of course, I mean the socio-cultural dynamics of a revolutionary atmosphere within the French community and how that affected the…” Remus’s voice trailed off as he turned to the next page of the enormous book.

“I’ve got an idea,” Peter said.  “Instead of just talking, let’s act out what happened.  Moony, you can narrate – throw in things like ‘socio-historical’ and ‘neo-Marxist arithmanthetical theory’ and we’ll be fine there – and Prongs can play the centaurs and Padfoot’ll play the Ottoman princess--”

“Bugger off,” Sirius muttered, flattening his fringe with both hands and smoothing it down over his left eye. 

“… ah, and that’s very interesting, some proto-nationalist tendencies seem to have cropped up here…” Remus turned another page.  “But the secular constitutionalism means that the centaurs… hell, what does it mean for the centaurs?”

The question was unanswerable, and they all observed a moment of silence while it passed into history itself.  After a moment, Peter continued, “And I’ll play everyone else.”

“So you’ll simulate the first Muggle world war, the separation of the Irish and British Ministries, and the repercussions of the Spanish Flu Pandemic on reform at St. Mungo’s?” James asked, reviewing his parchment.  “Ambitious, Wormtail, but nothing a smart rat can’t handle.  How will you do it?”

“Performance art,” Peter said, cocking his head and nodding.  “Yes, performance art.  I’ll take a chessboard full of pieces, move them about in a seemingly random pattern – I say seemingly because it will in fact be full of extremely auspicious meaning to the clever student of history – and then, at a strategic point, fling the entire thing out the window.”

James pondered this.  “Binns won’t get it.  His idea of art hasn’t moved past the cave paintings stage.”

“Please,” Peter said with a grin, “show the man – the ghost – some respect.  I heard him telling McGonagall that he’s recently gotten into this newfangled ‘marble sculpture’ movement.”

Remus said, “And someone has to mention – Padfoot, you’d better do it – the founding myth of the Giant Commune of Hungary--”

“Why is Padfoot doing everything?” James asked.

Peter snorted.  “Because Moony is in charge.  As he should be.  He’s got the patience to have read the book.”

James rolled his eyes.  “Oi!  Padfoot!  Stop playing with your hair, you bloody girl, and stand up for yourself!”

Sirius put his fingers under the tap, then ran them horizontally across his fringe.  “I’m just fixing it,” he muttered.  “Don’t want to look like you, Prongs.  We’ve got a lot of ladies to impress, and somebody here has got to do it.”

“Right, ladies to impress,” James snorted.  Moony!” He rounded on the other boy.  “Moony!  Earth to Moony!”

Remus glanced up from his book and frowned in Sirius’s general direction before returning to the book.  “Good looks are not going to get us a good grade.”

“Bloody prefects,” Peter muttered.

“Moony, how does Padfoot’s fringe look?” James asked.

Sirius shot him a murderous look.

Remus glanced up again, this time managing to focus on Sirius for a second before returning to the book.  “Spiky, I suppose.  How is it supposed to look?  And did anyone else think it was suspicious that that wizard, what’s his name, Heller or something, was in contact with the Russians?  I think we need to consider that communism played a larger role in our thesis…”

“We have a thesis?” James asked incredulously. 

Remus slammed the book shut and said, “What do your notes say, James?  What did we manage to spend ten minutes on last night before you ran off to Quidditch practice--”

“And don’t think we don’t know that Quidditch practice is code for ‘stalking Lily Evans,’ because Moony and I ran into Flannigan in the library and he said there wasn’t practice last night,” Sirius added, not looking away from the mirror. 

“Don’t you both team up against me!” James snapped. 

“Mutiny,” Peter murmured.  “Mutiny in the ranks. Just like in the Seventeenth Goblin Rebellion.”

Sirius finally let his hair drop and plucked the book from Remus’ hands.  “Don’t get me wrong, Prongs.  I think all this is a load of shit.  But you should have listened to Moony, because he’s told us the entire assignment.”  He glanced at Remus quickly and added, “We’d best be getting to class.”

“But what are we doing?” Peter asked in a panicky voice. 

Remus hopped off the counter and nodded to the parchment all over the floor.  “Refer to your notes.  God knows, I spent three hours writing them for you last night.”

Sirius reached out and tucked in the tag on the back of Remus’s fuzzy red jumper.  Remus jumped a bit and glanced back at him, frowning, and Sirius muttered, “Tag out.  Just fixing it.”

“Oh,” Remus said.  There was a pause, and then, “Thanks.”

“Yeah, ok,” Sirius said.  They looked at each other until Remus blinked, and then Sirius motioned towards the door and said, “Let’s go.”

James yanked the door open and said, “Bugger all of this.  I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“We’ll be fine,” Remus replied, but he didn’t exactly sound sure.

 

History of Magic happened to be a double period that particular day of the week, making it somehow triply torturous (no one had yet established how it had achieved that particular trick of time, although many theories involving the Department of Mysteries had been proposed).  An hour and a half into it, five droning presentations had passed and the entire class was in a semi-comatose state as Sirius, Remus, Peter, and James stepped before them. 

James cleared his throat, saw Lily Evans rolling her eyes in the front row, and dropped his notes.  Beside him, Remus smiled nervously and played with the frayed sleeve of his jumper; to his other side, Peter stared at his shoes, frozen.  Sirius stood to Remus’s left, leaning against the stone wall, no notes in hand, looking more like a disgruntled punk rocker than someone about to give a history presentation. 

“So,” James began, having collected his notes and reading directly from them, “we can begin by saying that the fourth Goblin Conference of Berlin recognized the difficulties inherent in…”

Less than two minutes had passed before Lily had her head on the desk.  James’s voice had dropped to a defeated and nearly inaudible mumble, Remus’s smile was strained, and Peter continued to find the floor to be the most interesting thing in the room.  This was, in fact, true: the floor tiles formed a fractal representative of a complex 14th century Arithmancy equation that reconciled the wave and particle natures of light.  Peter did not even know this, and he still found the floor to be the most interesting thing in the room.

“Bugger this,” Sirius whispered in Remus’s ear.  “Give me your jumper.”

“What?” Remus asked, startled out of his nervous reverie.  He twisted his head and frowned at Sirius.  A whispered conference developed. 

“My jumper?”

“Yeah, let me borrow it.”

“Why?”

“Just let me do it.”

“But why?”

Sirius made a hissing noise between his teeth.  “Just, Moony, just trust me.”

Beside Remus, James cleared his throat and mumbled, “And then the socio-political historical theorists of the economy weighed in, and said…”

Remus reconsidered.  “Ok.”

“Come outside with me.”

Remus glanced at Binns – the professor was draped over a chair at the back of the classroom, nodding his head, although whether he was agreeing with James or falling asleep was not clear – and then back at Sirius.

“Ok.”

The slipped behind James and Peter and out the door.  If either of the other two noticed their departure, they didn’t say anything.  Sirius shut the door to the classroom and said, “The way I see it, if we don’t do something soon, everyone in the class is going to think that we did something boring.”

Remus opened and closed his mouth a few times before he managed, “Maybe that’s not so bad, Sirius, if we get a good grade…”

“Are we men, Moony?” Sirius asked rhetorically, “Or are we Marauders?”

Remus raised his eyebrows.  “I didn’t realize the two were mutually exclusive.”

“You get my point,” Sirius snapped.  “And of course they are, we’re all animals.”

“Well, sometimes.”

“Right, so we’re not men all the time.”

“But are we Marauders all the time?”

“This is off-topic.”

“So was asking to borrow my jumper and then dragging me out of class in the middle of a presentation that we are supposed to be giving.”

“Yeah, well, James is doing just fine on his own.”

“If by ‘doing fine’ you mean putting our classmates into catatonic states…”

“Look, I didn’t ‘drag’ you, you walked out of class ahead of me.”

They were at an impasse, nose to nose in the hallway.  Remus’s lips had a slight upward tilt to them, his eyes dancing, despite the fact that Sirius thought he might have just won the argument.  He hated that look from Remus.  It made him lose his train of thought, drop his books, spill his ink, fall down staircases, and all other manner of embarrassing things that only made Remus’s lips quirk and eyes dance more.  It was almost as bad as when Remus was looking at something or someone else with that look, and all Sirius wanted to do was draw attention to himself until Remus turned it on him.

“What are you going to do with my jumper if I let you borrow it?”

Sirius grinned wickedly, and Remus took off his robe and peeled off his jumper, just to see where that grin was headed.  Remus was a man of many secrets, and one of the ones buried deepest was that Sirius could make him do anything just by looking mildly roguish; a grin of true wickedness was the most dangerous weapon in Sirius’s arsenal.  The only thing that kept Remus from doing everything Sirius asked was that Sirius had no idea and only employed the grin when he truly was feeling wicked – only about twenty-five to thirty times a week.

They went back inside the classroom.  Binns was still nodding, but Peter was talking now, stumbling over the words as he read straight from Remus’s notes.  James had a decidedly deer-in-the-headlights look on his face as he stared at Lily, now drooling onto her desk as she slept, and he didn’t notice either Remus or Sirius resume their places. 

“And then King Mogdror said… eh, I can’t read this word… Remus, what did King Mogdror say?  Doesn’t matter, I suppose, he said something that made – oh, I can’t read that word because it’s in German! – he said ‘Kleigstaggenrutten,’ I think, although I’ve no idea whatsoever what that means… Oh, yes, I see here, that means that the foreign policy all went to hell, just to provide you with a summary before I tell you the full details.”

Remus winced and was about to say something when he noticed a subtle change behind him.  He turned around in time to see something red and furry dart between James’s legs; Lily suddenly leapt out of her seat and screamed. 

“Potter!”

James jumped, blinked, and yelled, “What?”

The red furry thing was now scurrying around the room.  Remus looked sideways at Sirius while trying to also look concerned about the new development in their presentation and saw, for just a second, the wicked grin emerge.  His own lips fought against gravity but he managed to keep them under control as Lily flung her book bag at James and yelled, “What was that?”

“What was what?” he asked, managing to look wounded, bewildered, and innocent all at the same time.  It was a look that any Marauder could admire, and James slipped into it naturally, without even being aware of what the disturbance was or who’d caused it.  Sirius almost nodded with approval.

Several other students were now shrieking, leaping out of their chairs, or slapping at something that seemed to be racing about the floor unnaturally fast.  Binns, who had slipped all the way through his chair when he fell asleep, managed to wake up in time to see half the class racing out the door and the other half climbing atop their desks and pointing at the floor.  At the front, all looking extremely confused by the pandemonium, Peter, Remus, James and Sirius still stood, holding onto their parchment and books.

“Oh,” Binns said vaguely, “is class over?”

Peter seized upon the opportunity just as Remus hit the clock with a silent stunning spell.  “Yes, sir, I think the clock is broken.”

“The second hand isn’t moving,” Sirius supplied helpfully.

“Yes, yes,” Binns said.  “Well… I see most of us have… dismissed ourselves…”  He froze and looked at the four of them.  “Did you dismiss my class?”

They all looked at one another and then back at him. 

“You dismissed my class,” Binns decided, warming to the subject as well as they had ever seen him warm to anything.  “Minerva warned me that you four were troublemakers.”

“But--”

“Professor, we didn’t--”

“That’s not fair!”

“We never said--”

Binns made some sort of facial expression at them – it was difficult to tell on a ghost standing in front of a grey stone wall – and said, “I will be fully in control of my classes from now on, I can assure you of that.”

“Yes, sir,” Sirius said quickly, hanging his head in the picture of supplication.  The other three nodded vigorously and attempted to look guilty – but not so guilty that they would get in trouble –

And the classroom door swung open, revealing Professor McGonagall.  She took one look at Sirius and arched one thin eyebrow – “Mr. Black,”—and then lifted up the remains of a red jumper – “Mr. Lupin.”

Remus kicked Sirius in the shin and mouthed, “Trust me.”

“You will come with me, please, unless Professor Binns is still speaking to you.”

“No, no,” Binns said, waving a hand in dismissal.  “These miscreants are all yours.”

She nodded curtly to the two of them and they followed her out the door with doleful glances in James’s and Peter’s direction.  She walked them to her office, fast enough that the words “forced march” entered both boys’ minds, and ushered them inside with a dark look.

“I’m going to leave the two of you here while I try to collect your fellow students and restore order to Professor Binns’ class,” she snapped.  “Only you, Mr. Black, would perform such a flashy piece of Transfiguration.  And you, Mr. Lupin, ought to be ashamed of yourself for continuously providing Mr. Black with the means to get into trouble!”  She slammed the door to her office shut, leaving the two of them standing side by side in the center of the room.

“We might as well sit down,” Remus said wearily, drawing out one of the hard chairs beside her desk and sitting. 

“We might as well have our names carved into these things,” Sirius muttered, jerking a second chair into place next to Remus’s.  “We sit in them often enough.”  He flung himself down so that their thighs touched and crossed his arms over his chest.

Remus waited a moment to see if Sirius was going to come out of his sulk, but when nothing changed, he said shyly, “I think your hair looks really good, you know.”

Sirius looked up quickly and said, “Really?”

“Yeah, I think,” Remus replied, unnerved by the intensity of Sirius’s gaze.  “For, you know, hair.”

“Thanks,” Sirius muttered, looking away just as quickly.  “You’re really smart, you know.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah.”

“What, all that history stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.  No.  It’s not… it’s just books and stuff.”

“I guess.  But, you’re still really smart.”

“So’re you.”

“You have really good hair too.”

Remus laughed.  “I don’t do anything with it.”

“Sorry,” Sirius sniffed, “just trying to give you a compliment.  But I didn’t really mean your hair.  I meant… when you smile.  It’s really good.”

Remus gave him an odd look and he floundered.  “Not just your smile, um, because you do that a lot.  But when you’re smiling but you’re trying not to be.  Like you’ve got a secret that’s really good and you don’t want anybody to know, so you’re keeping it in, but…”

“You too.  Not, not like you’re keeping it in.”  Remus was playing with his tie.  “But when you grin.  When you’re about to… to do something bad.”

“Yeah?” Sirius asked.  “You… like that?”

Remus shrugged and nodded at the same time.  “I… you know… like you, when I’m smiling but not.”

“Yeah,” Sirius said decisively.  “Yeah.”  He sat forward very quickly.  “Would it be weird if I wanted to kiss you?  Just to like, try it out?”

Remus dropped the tie and said, “Maybe.  Or, not.  I don’t know.”

“Ok,” Sirius said.  “Um, I’m going to try it.”

“Ok.”

They stared at each other until approximately ten seconds before McGonagall walked back into her office with James and Peter in tow.

For a moment, all was stunned silence, until:

 

“I knew it!”


End file.
